


Statements from a Scientist

by Notmarysue



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast), Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Confusion, Crossover, Fear, Gen, Happy Ending, Mild fear, POV First Person, mild distress
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-09
Updated: 2020-04-09
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:08:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23564320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Notmarysue/pseuds/Notmarysue
Summary: Statement of Mister Carlos Cienca, regarding strange occurrences experienced in the desert community of Night Vale.
Comments: 21
Kudos: 114





	Statements from a Scientist

**Author's Note:**

> Three important notes.
> 
> 1.) This briefly touches on characters from my long from WTNV fic 'An Entire Year of You'. Don't worry, you don't need to have read it to know what's happening, but if you don't recognise one of the names that's why.
> 
> 2.) I still haven't read any of the WTNV so I don't know what the canon explanation of The Man in the Tanned Leather Jacket is. Please forgive any contradictions.
> 
> 3.) I'm really new to The Magnus Archive fandom. I started listening last week and just finished season 1, I'll be starting season 2 soon (and yes, some of you will probably notice by the end that I'm slightly in denial about one particular season 1 event). I've managed to avoid most major spoilers so far and I'm really enjoying experiencing the story for the first time, so please don't discuss anything passed season 1 in the comments.
> 
> Thank you and enjoy.

Statement of Mister Carlos Cienca, regarding strange occurrences experienced in the desert community of Night Vale. Originally given on the 14th of February 2013. Read by Jon Simms, head archivist at the Magnus Institute, London.

**Statement transcript:**

I don’t know where to begin really. I’ve barely been in this town for more than a few months and already I could probably fill out dozens of this statement forms front and back, hundreds even. Not that I have any guarantee you’d get any of them. Communication here is difficult. The phones rarely work, and the post office has been closed since I arrived, though nobody will tell me why. Still there are ways of getting a message out, providing you know who to talk to.

I should probably start from the beginning. I used to be a science lecturer at the University of What Is. It’s not a very well-known university, kind of out of the way, which suited me just fine. The only students who ever attended were the ones who really wanted to be there. No slackers at the University of What Is. Sometime in May I was approached by a man who introduced himself as Mister Markson. Well, I say ‘approached’. He didn’t really approach me at all. He was just sitting in my office one day after a lecture. I’m pretty sure he broke in. Anyway, after I got over the shock and stopped swearing, I was given an offer. I’d be given a research team, a place to stay, and a considerable amount of money and in return I’d spend the next year studying the town of Night Vale, some small desert community that nobody had ever heard of. I should have asked more questions, I know that. I wanted to, I even tried, but Mister Markson brushed them off and it quickly became clear that I wasn’t going to get any answers. All he would tell me was that Night Vale was one of the most scientifically interesting town in America. It could be the most scientifically interesting town in the world. With credentials like that, how could I possibly refuse?

If you stood just outside Night Vale, on the dust road, you could easily convince yourself that it’s just a normal town. It certainly looks like a normal town, full of houses and stores and a little school. It has a town hall and a local radio station keeping everyone informed on the day to day. I could tell a hundred stories about that radio station alone. I don’t think you’d find them useful though. Night Vale is _not_ a normal town. It doesn’t have a normal day to day. The supernatural is simply their natural. People live and die at the hands of creatures and entities way beyond my understanding and they talk about it the way you and I would talk about the weather. I’m trying so hard to find the science to explain it, but I’m already starting to think I’ll never find the answers to all my questions, if there even are answers. Science is an amazing thing, but in this town, it seems so…limiting.

Anyway, onto the reason I’m writing, or at least the reason I eventually decided on writing about. It was about seven months into my year long stay and things had started to settle down. Well, they hadn’t, but I’d started to get used to it. I mean it was still weird, the kind of things me and my team have to deal with on a daily basis ranges from confusing and inconvenient to deadly and impossible to control, and that’s before you take into account the hostility from the locals. The bread turned into snakes once, that was an interesting day. I’ll write to you about that one day, I think. Sorry, I’m getting distracting. My point is I’d started to accept the weirdness of it all and I’d even made a few friends to look out for me when things go south. There’s even a nice man here, a radio host, Cecil Palmer. I don’t see things going anywhere with him but when it happened, I was feeling pretty good about life. That’s when the man in the tanned leather jacket showed up.

It’s hard to recall the exact details. I know that’s not helpful, but I have to be completely honest with you. I remember that was in my apart fiddling with some clocks. The clocks don’t work properly in Night Vale, I’ve bought hundreds to check. I’m not sure that time works properly in Night Vale either, but that’s a lot harder to prove. I’d been dissecting the clocks all day and finding absolutely nothing inside, and I was in the middle of leaving a voicemail for Cecil when I noticed a figure. I could see his long dark shadow through my window, he was tall with broad shoulders. I knew right off the bat that it was a man, but that was about all I could really be sure of. I couldn’t really see him fully. Even when I went to the window to get a better look, it was like there was something stopping me from really seeing him. I remember he was wearing a tanned leather jacket and clinging onto a suitcase, which I presume was also leather, and as stupid as it sounds, I could swear he was buzzing. No matter how hard I tried; I couldn’t see his face. He didn’t knock, he didn’t even seem to move. I wasn’t really sure what to do. Years of horror movies, along with the few months I’d spent in Night Vale, taught me that the last thing I should do is open the door, and I didn’t really feel comfortable leaning out of the window and yelling at him to go away, so I did the only thing I could think of. I called Cecil again.

I don’t remember what exactly I said to Cecil. I remember that he didn’t pick up and I know I was overwhelmingly disappointed, but I wasn’t surprised. As eager as he often was and still is to talk to me, he’s a radio host first and foremost and I didn’t want to get him into trouble with station management by ringing repeatedly. I started to leave a voicemail. I think I was trying to explain to him what was going on, either to try and rationalise it by speaking out aloud or to make sure he had an explanation in case something terrible happened to me. He was the only one I was worried about leaving without an explanation. I was halfway through talking when it saw me. It turned to look at me through the window, twisting its head so fast I’m surprised it didn’t snap. All of a sudden, I could see its eyes. Not its face, just its eyes. Those dark, sunken eyes that seemed far deeper than they possibly could have been, like black holes, all pupil and no iris. I quickly hung up and started to back away from the door as the handle began to rattle. Luckily, I’d had the door seen to recently and I knew the lock was brand new. It never stopped I waited there, watching the thing rattle tirelessly at the handle, but it couldn’t. It never stopped staring at me. Those eyes kept locked on mine the entire time, before it finally seemed to give up and walked away. I sighed with relief. But when I turned around, there it was. I have no idea how it got in, but it was there, still staring.

I have no idea what happened next, at least, I’m not really sure. I think I screamed. I know I screamed. I don’t think any rational person wouldn’t. And then, well, then nothing happened. There’s no other way to describe it. I think some time had passed, I think me and the figure had a conversation, but the next thing I remember for sure is standing in my apartment, alone, dizzy, and confused. I was just stood there with a letter in my hand, which I didn’t remember picking up. It didn’t seem to matter though. The letter wasn’t anything ominous, just some podcast producers with yet another employment option. I put it aside and brushed it off. The door was still closed and locked, so it didn’t feel like anything was a problem.

For a while, I was content to forget about the whole thing. I left another voicemail for Cecil apologising for alarming him and moved on with my day. I thought perhaps nothing had happened at all. Maybe I’d been so stressed by my obsession with the clocks that I’d made up some sort of strange, sinister figure. Every second the less I knew for sure. It was like waking up from a dream, I was sure that it had never been real at all. At least, I was until I talked to my research team.

There’s something everyone in Night Vale knows. Cecil is a sweet man, an amazing man, but his social skills are pretty rusty. He has no boundaries and he’s terrible in when it comes to privacy. Those voicemails I talked about, well Cecil played those voicemails for the whole town to hear, including my team. Apparently, they all had experiences with the man in the tanned leather jacket. None of them could remember much about him, not his voice, not his face, not what they talked about. They all remembered the jacket and the eyes, but nothing more than that.

There’s nothing more that I can tell you really. I don’t think that you can help me. I don’t even think there’s anything I need to be helped with. The figure hasn’t showed up again and I doubt it was harmful. I mean, it would have hurt me already if it wanted, wouldn’t? It had me right there, I doubt it would have just delivered my mail and walked off. I don’t know, I don’t suppose it matters. There’s five months left on my contract. I fully intend on leaving this weird little the moment it expires.

**Statement ends**

This is certainly a tricky one. According to every map, state department, and geography expert we could find, there is no town by the name of Night Vale in America. In fact, there is nowhere called Night Vale in the world that anyone can find. However, Sasha did some digging. She stumbled on some online forums for a radio broadcast that claims to be from Night Vale, hosted by one Cecil Palmer. Nobody seems to be able to distinguish whether this broadcast is truth or well-crafted fiction and most conversations on the matter dissolve into fangirling about something called ‘Cecilos’. I’m not really sure what ‘Cecilos’ is, but it sounds dangerous.

Additionally, despite its strange name, the University of What It Is does exist. It’s small and extremely underfunded, but its still fully operational. Mister Cienca worked in their science department from 2007 to 2012. In mid-2012, Mister Cienca requested and was promptly granted a year long absent for a study break. He didn’t return at the end of this break and all attempts to contact him have failed.

In my mind, there are three possibilities here:

  1. This is one elaborate hoax.
  2. Mister Cienca somehow managed to delude himself into believing he was part of an ongoing internet story.



Or

3\. Night Vale is real, but there’s a lot more to that little town than simple shadow men and snakes.

It’s hard to know for sure what to believe.

We did manage to get hold of Mister Cienca, now Mister Palmer, for a follow up phone interview. The line was bad, but we manage to have a sort conversation. Despite his apparent eagerness to leave, it appears he’s still there to this day. It seems he’s happily married and plans on living in Night Vale for the rest of his life.

“It’s not that bad once you get used.” He told us. “They even managed to fix time, so that’s nice.”

We asked him if there had been anymore supernatural occurrences since he sent us his statement. He laughed at this.

“No.” He said. “At least, none I plan on telling you about.”

**Recording ends**


End file.
